Three Dark Crowns (Three Dark Crowns #1) - Kendare Blake Page 0,78

her face.

Most of her right cheek is gone, hollow where it should be plump. Lines of dark stitches cross from the corner of her mouth to below the outside edge of her eye. Another, larger line of stitches covers the hollow of her cheekbone, all the way down to her chin.

“Well,” she says. “A hairsbreadth higher and I would have needed to wear an eye patch.” She starts to laugh.

“Arsinoe, stop.”

She watches the stitches pull in the mirror until blood spurts down her chin. Jules tries to calm her, and calls for Cait, and Ellis, but Arsinoe only laughs harder.

The cuts stretch open. The salt from her tears burns. It is a lucky thing that she never cared about what she looked like.

Jules finds Joseph in his family’s shipyard, sifting through a tangled mess of rope and rigging. It is a warm day, and he has taken his jacket off and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. She watches him dismally as he wipes sweat from his brow. He is the kind of handsome that draws every eye.

“Jules,” he says when he sees her, and sets down his pile of rigging. “How is she?”

“She is Arsinoe,” she says. “She tore her stitches out. They are putting them back in now. I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t take any more.”

He rubs his fingers clean on a handkerchief. He would take her hand if he thought she would let him.

“I was going to bring her flowers,” he says, and chuckles. “Can you imagine? I want to see her, but I don’t know if she will want to see me. If she will want to be seen.”

“She will want to see you,” says Jules. “Arsinoe will never hide from anything.”

Jules turns to face the water, obscured by boats in dry dock, barely visible past the edge of the pier.

“I feel strange,” she says. “Without Camden. Without Arsinoe. As if I’ve lost my shadows.”

“They will be back,” Joseph says.

“Not like they were.”

Joseph wraps tentative fingers around her shoulder until she leans back into him. For a moment, it seems that he could hold her up, take all her weight in just one hand.

“I love her too, Jules,” he says. “Almost as much as I love you.”

Together, they look out at the cove. It is quiet, nothing there but low waves and wind, and it seems like you could sail forever.

“Joseph . . . I wish we had gotten her off the island five years ago.”

Billy does not smile when he comes into the room, and that is good. Or better, at least, than the guilty, shaky, forced grins that the healers and the Milones have been trying to wear. He holds his hand up. He brought her flowers. Vibrant, yellow-orange blooms that do not come from any hothouse in Wolf Spring.

“My father sent for these,” he says. “All the way from my mother’s favorite florist. He sent for them the moment we heard. Before we knew whether you would live or die. He said we could use them either way, for courting or condolences. Shall I stomp on them?”

“In a naturalist house?”

She takes them. They have small velvet petals, and smell a little like the oranges they import in the summer.

“They are lovely,” she says. “Jules will be able to keep them blooming for a long time.”

“But not you,” he says.

“No. Not me.”

She sets the flowers on her bedside table, near the windowsill and the dry, curled shell of her dead winter fern. Billy sets his jacket on a chair, but instead of sitting in it, takes a seat at the foot of her bed.

“How have you come to be here?” he asks. “If you are truly without a . . . gift . . . then why place you with the Milones? Did they win some kind of lottery? Or lose one?”

Arsinoe chuckles and pain sparks up the side of her face. Billy leans forward as she holds her cheek, but there is nothing he can do. And besides, the laughter is worth it.

“It was never said that I was giftless,” Arsinoe says. “At least, not back then. None of us were branded as giftless.”

“Branded?”

“The queen knows what she has when she has them,” Arsinoe says. “Then she leaves us for the Midwife to raise. When we are old enough, our families come to claim us.

“For me, it was Jules. She was the only reason I wasn’t terrified. She came along, holding Aunt Caragh’s hand on one side and Matthew’s hand on the